Robert Blake (actor)

Michael James Gubitosi (18 September 1933-), known professionally as Robert Blake, was an American actor and political activist. He was born in Nutley, New Jersey in 1933 to an Italian-American family, and he was the product of a secret affair between his mother and her husband's brother; he was an unwanted child, and he was neglected until his father took the family to Los Angeles in 1938 and had the children work as extras. Blake became a famous child star in Our Gang and other movies, and, after service in the US Army, he appeared in various television and movie roles.

By the 1980s, Blake had gone through a failed marriage, had established a troublemaker reputation for himself on talk shows, and came to be bipolar. He took an eight-year break from acting and became an activist, supporting union leader Cesar Chavez and opposing nuclear energy. On 4 May 2001, his second wife Bonnie Lee Bakley was shot in the head in Blake's car as it was parked outside of a Studio City Italian restaurant. Bakley had taken his wife to the restaurant to eat, but, as they prepared to leave, Blake forgot that he had left his gun in the restaurant (he had a concealed carry permit), and he returned to the restaurant to retrieve it. When he returned to the car, Bakley was dying from a gunshot wound. Bakley was known to be a lifelong con artist, fraudster, a (initially underage) nude model, and as a "woman with a past", and Blake was the obvious suspect for the murder, as he had parked his wife a block and a half away on a dark street, had returned to the restaurant to retrieve his gun, and his new wife was dead. However, the murder weapon was not the weapon that Blake had retrieved, although two retired stuntmen came forward and claimed that Blake had hired them to kill his wife.

Blake's bodyguard was arrested in Burbank, and Blake was booked on two counts of soliciting murder and for murder after the toughest investigation in LAPD history. After several failed attempts, he finally managed to land an interview with a major reporter, Barbara Walters, in which he described his first meeting with Bakley and the leadup to his wife's death. He was found not guilty in March 2005, but he was found liable for her wrongful death.